With all of the advancements made in JavaScript and newer, shinier frameworks, it is sometimes easy to forget that WordPress still relies on the aging jQuery library.

The same holds true for thousands of plugins and themes in the official WordPress directories.

For a platform that routinely suggests that users need to be running the latest and greatest version, it is odd that WordPress itself has not done the same with third-party code that it relies on.

WordPress currently bundles jQuery version 1.12.4, a version of the library released in 2016.

In the long term, he said a future option might be to move the WordPress admin to native (vanilla) JavaScript completely, which is a sentiment shared in the comments on his announcement post to update the version of jQuery bundled with WordPress.

Far too many themes and plugins rely on this dated version of jQuery to move any faster.

While plugins could choose to overwrite core WordPress’s bundled version of jQuery with the latest version, themes have had no such option.

The tentative plan is to update to the latest version of jQuery and add the latest version of jQuery Migrate as part of the WordPress 5.6 release.

“Again, Migrate will be used to help in updating jQuery based scripts, and also as a backward-compatibility ‘fix’ while plugins and themes get updated,” said Ozz.

“The version of Migrate in WordPress 5.6 will be different, as it will correspond to the latest jQuery version.

It will serve the same purpose as when it was added for the first time, but now will help core, plugins, and themes get updated from jQuery 1.12.4 to 3.5.1 (or later).”.

The end goal is to remove the reliance on Migrate and ship the latest version of jQuery until someday — perhaps far into the future — there may no longer be a need for bundling it with WordPress at all.